Wednesday, April 30, 2008

As both a mother and the former teacher of Dude Where's My Comma? (a groundbreaking if poorly received grammar seminar for apathetic high schoolers in Wyoming), I feel myself to be in a perfect position to help parents when faced with one or both of the following problems: children with sloppy grammar, and/or parents who themselves are embarrassed about their own sloppy grammar (and therefore unable to correct their children's sloppy grammar).

Gramms is important; I truly believe it. If you have a decent grasp of it people will think you're very smart. Even if you're not. Also good gramms gives you the ability to say what you mean, mean what you say, and understand what others are saying to you even if they don't exactly know what they are saying, and even if what they are saying isn't very nice or interesting. In short, good gramms is good. And it's extremely hard to learn to speak gooder as a grownup if nobody ever taught you how to talk good when you were little.

Thus today I morph into Grammarmama: improving your grammar, one child at a time. At the end of this Grammarmama series I will test willing readers with a super-tough quiz. The first set of correct answers will entitle that Grammarmama to a delicious prize, perhaps even one of these tee-shirts from the Semicolon Appreciation Society.

Lesson the first: Lie or Lay?

My pet peeve: When Crabhubby tells Crabtot to "go and lay down and Dad will be in to tell you a goodnight story." "Lie, not lay" I correct him. Even at her tender age Crabtot knows this irritates me. So she frequently tells me to go and "lay" down. "Daddy and I say 'lay,'" she tells me. Not for long, little girl!!! Grammarmama will beat it out of you!!!

"Lie" vs. "lay" is a tough one to explain without resorting to dry terminology involving transitive and intransitive verbs. So I'm just gonna tell it to you straight: if you're thinking about reclining or having someone else go and recline or take a nap or have a horizontal Time Out or whatever, you speak of "lying down." Like so:

Mommy attempts to lie down for half an hour during the child's Quiet Time.

If, however, you are thinking of putting something down, or having someone else put something down—like having Grandma put the baby in the crib—then it's "lay" you're looking for, e.g.,

Grandma lays the baby down to sleep.The hen lays her eggs.

You see, in the above, someone or something is actually doing more than merely snoozing. So please, tell your teenage daughter she isn't going to "lay out" and get a tan. She's not doing anything except reclining her lazy body. So, schlubby and diffident adolescent that she is, she's off to "lie" out and get a tan. Not "lay."

Things do, however, get trickier in the past tense. When it's been and done, "lie" turns to "lay" and "lay" turns to "laid." But "lay" never turns to "laid."** So you never "laid" down for three minutes before the baby started fussing, you merely "lay" down for a few before it all went bust. Let's reprise that first sentence, but now put it into the past tense:

Although Mommy lay down for an hour, she could not sleep, for the child made too much noise.

So, in the past tense, it's "Mommy lay down on her bed for a while." NOT "Mommy laid down..." The mommy hen, however, laid her eggs last week. And Grandma laid the baby down to sleep before sneaking outside to smoke cigarettes and quaff a bottle of sherry.

Phew! Indeed, the issue gets much more confusing with tenses and so forth. Man! Kind of makes you want to go and lie down, doesn't it? But for now, let's stick to the main problem, shall we? If you want to learn one thing and one thing only about all this lay/lie biz, just know that you mostly just wanna lie down. So next time someone in your house goes to "lay" down, you lay down the law. The law of grammar, that is.

Anyone else got a grammar pet peeve?

And if anyone knows why Blogger insists on randomly mixing single- and double-spaced formatting in one blog entry, DO DIVULGE!!!

**Lay never turns to laid in past tense, unless someone is involved in something sexual. But if you aren't getting laid (which also involves a process in which someone doing more than merely snoozing [one hopes]) then it's lay you're looking for. Get it?

27 comments:

Was that the test? Did you tell a lie? If so go lie down. I wish I could go lie down, but I remembered that I had lain in bed two afternoons earlier this week and Mr. MK ... well he's ready to lay me out cold (not really) if I go lie down this early!

My grammar pet peeve is something I can't actually be "peevy" about since no one actually seems to do it: it's the usage of the word "whom." I say things like "you can pump off whomever you choose," and I get made fun of. All the time. It's actually weird that I'm so exact since both of my parents learned English as their second (or third) language. My parents didn't teach me correct grammar because they were struggling with the language day by day. So, here's proof that you can go ahead and expect good grammar from anyone and the "my parents were immigrants" excuse is a bunch of bubkis.

Lie vs. lay bugs me too. I am no grammar queen when it comes to casual writing or emails but I sure have my peeves. Double negatives, for one. Or "seen" instead of "saw". Put them both together, I'm gonna lose it. As in, "I never seen nothing". Urg!

That was great. Can you do something about people who don't understand the difference possessives (cat's toy) and plurals (cats)? I was able to teach FIRST graders when to use apostrophes, but I see signs everywhere with apostrophes being used in plurals. It's driving me insane.

Bob Dylan should have been shot for saying "lay lady lay, lay across my big brass bed" (and for his inability to actually sing).

I suppose that strictly speaking, Simon & Garfunkel were correct to say "like a bridge over troubled waters, I will lay me down", but that's only if you believe it's acceptable to talk about yourself in the third person (and as a thing).

It sounds a bit cow-pokish to me, as in "I'm going to git me some chilli for my corndog" or whatever it is people may say in Crabtown.

Bring it on Grammarmama.

Bad grammar impacts society way too much, and so, too, does the verbing of nouns.

I too hate double negatives. I also have to grit my teeth when somebody starts a sentence with "What it is, is..." (maybe it's a Liverpool thing?). (Let me know crabmommy if there was far too much punctuation after that bracketed sentence!) Having said that, my grammar isn't the best and I always struggle with "written" and "wrote". In fact there is probably a plethora of incorrect grammar in this whole paragraph for your delectation!

OOOh a can of worms opening here eh?I am both pedantic and wrong about gramm. I do hate the lie/lay thing and less/fewer. A big one that really gets me going is disintersted/uninterested.I love the random use of apsostrophes in shops e.g. tomatoe's and I wait in hope for the day I see gateau'x in a cake shop.

I've only ever heard peopl say "on line" in New York City. Maybe it's because they tend to be right on your proverbial ass instead of standing nice and orderly behind you.Grammar things don't bother me that much (which is funny since I have an M.A. in English and haave taught composition), but I hate the overuse of certain words. For example, the use of "gift" as a verb. Why say you "gifted" someone with something when you can just say you gave it to them? Another one I hate is when people say they are "growing their business," as if it were a tomato plant. It just seems like lazy verbiage to me. How about enriching your business, or making it more productive, or ensuring its success? Wouldn't any of those be more specific descriptions of what you're doing?Phew. Glad I got that of my chest ;)

I wasn't going to, esp since I'm feeling particularly crabby myself this am, but... A friend spent the last 18 months writing a 534 page novel. Heart, soul, entire being went into this novel. All friend wants is for me to read it and give 'an overview. Does it work as a novel?'

sigh...

Aside from the fact that it's a genre I'd never read, ugh, it's riddled with poor sentence structure (I assume the dry leaves crunched underfoot, not the unicorn), obvious spelling mistakes that spellcheck didn't catch because they are words ('on' instead of 'one'), and grammar...

'A person that...' Shouldn't it be 'a person who/whom...' ? Isn't 'that' reserved for nonsentient things? (should nonsentient have a hyphen? should it be two words?)

This task is making me nuts. I can't get beyond the mistakes and concentrate on the plot.

Fall from Grace: yeesh. I think you have to tell her what any editor/writing teacher would: grammar counts. Get the syntax cleaned up (by a pro if need be) so the reader can concentrate on the rest without being distracted. Except it sounds as though the rest is awful too...But "a person that" is ok. A person who/whom [context-specific]" is better to my ear but "that" is onsidered acceptable with people too when I last checked my Chicago Manual of Style.Here's a good bday present for your friend: pocket style MLA guide by Diana Hacker.

I cried tears of joy last week when my five year old asked me "what shall I try on first" in the dressing room. She also uses the be irrealis- were- in statements of distant possibility. The sublime subjunctive out of the mouth of a Texas kindergarten student!

It's probably not a surprise that two of my favorite books for leisure reading are The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, both by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.

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On this website I will never:*speak of the enchanting constant joy and transformative wonderment of motherhood*dispense little nuggets about what my child has taught me*tell any mom to stop and smell the diapers "because it all goes by in the blink of an eye"*make jokes about bowel movements and baby body fluids (because it's not my thing and it can be found abundantly elsewhere)*use the word "miracle"*count my blessings*chart my child's developmental milestones*seem to be in a good or grateful mood*be mean about my friends or family because they'll get me back

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Disclaimer:Let me say once for the record: like any mother I adore my own tot, think she is more brilliant, beautiful and gifted than yours, but this goes without saying. So I'm not going to say it (again). Rather, I vow to use my precious bloody-little time to talk about the more wretched and tricky aspects of momhood, pausing often to drown myself in a vat of self-pity and whining. Welcome!

About Me

Originally South African, then was an urban mommy (NYC), then hubby and I decided NYC sucks unless one is awash in cash...so we decamped to the smalltown cowboy west, to a town of many hyperfit, cheery "Look On the Bright Side" moms. Too much cheeriness forced us north and west and urban and rainy. I am happier in gloom. Crabmommy is mom to one child and one only, and by God it's going to stay that way. Recent musings in a variety of fancy literary magazines that nobody reads SO THEN I GOT A REAL WRITING JOB with Cookie magazine online, where I have a bloglet about momming. (Like I don't plug that one enough. Sheesh.)
email: crabmommy [then u make the at sign] gmail [dot] com